ST. FREDA

A STORY

Photo by Paul Matheson on Unsplash

I shook my head slowly, reluctantly—alright, somewhat hesitantly—and wondered how I could call myself a war correspondent when I didn't know anything about the causes and effects of the war I was supposed to be reporting. Rudi simply nodded as if he understood, or perhaps he expected that sort of an answer—saying something along the lines that it was always like that; nobody ever bothered trying to understand China, and now they'd lost it to the Chinese. I didn't understand what he meant at the time—and I don't doubt for a moment that he knew I didn't either—but he went on anyway.

"Feng-shih lived in luxuriously, opulent, splendour—as befit a Warlord of his stature," Rudi said intentionally, and I could see a slight smile trace across his cracked lips. I assumed it was an aside to himself, because his voice seemed tinged with irony, and his smile was a contemptuous sneer; there was a hint of laughter that seemed to dance on the edge of his glassy eyes, peeking out from the half closed lids.

"He was sixty-three years old when I first met him, and though he'd inherited his position from his father, he'd held on to it with an iron will and dogged tenacity—no, a determination—for more than forty-five years. In his lifetime, he'd survived famine, flood, invasion, petty wars and outright rebellion; he saw the collapse of the mandarins, the rise and fall of the Boxers, and the disintegration of the Manchus—the last of the great dynasties—and all of it, a result of the Tai-ping rebellion his father took part in before Feng-shih was even born. And who says the sins of the father aren't visited on the sons?" he asked with a slow smile. I thought perhaps he was thinking of his own life, and the sins of his own parents, rather than the Warlord's.

"Feng-shih once stood with Chiang Kai-shek, supporting the Nationalist Party and his army--all the while knowing Chiang Kai-shek was eager to overthrow the Warlords and establish a new central government. Feng-shih believed Manchuria couldn't survive without the power of the Warlords, but he also knew it was easier to stand with Chiang rather than against him—or at least until he didn't need him any more. A Warlord had to understand patience as much as he did party politics, and Feng-shih couldn't be faulted for not understanding one or the other.

"Feng-shih was a shrewd politician when it came to making alliances and backing the right party; he was always three steps ahead of his enemies. He once even supported Feng Yu-hsiang--have you ever heard of him? He was called the Christian General because he forced his troops to convert to Protestantism, or at least his version of it—" he laughed lightly. "Feng-shih called him 'General Christian', as if it was his name. He also supported Yen Hsi-shan as well, another petty Warlord, only a little more ambitious as far as his plans for China went: He wanted to put himself in place of the fallen Manchu dynasty. He wanted it all. Well, these two men formed an alliance and marched on Peking—even holding it for a short time too—until Chang Tso-lin, yet another local Warlord, (they do seem to come out of the woodwork, don't they?)--defeated both of them and ran them out of Peking. That was way back in 1924--ancient history as far as you're concerned. When they both tried to occupy Peking again in 1928, Feng-shih stood with them this time. He sent over fifty thousand troops with weapons—you know, cannons and that sort of thing?—but—and I don't know if either one of them knew about it or not, or even cared by that time—Feng-shih was one of the principle supporters of Chang Tso-lin back in '24. Politics makes for strange bedfellows as they say, and looking at Feng-shih's career," he said with a slow shake of his head, "I can understand why.

"He backed the Communists when it suited him, and betrayed them just as quickly. When Chiang Kai-shek broke away with the Kuomintang—that was what they called the Nationalist Party—but when he broke away because he said the army was full of Communists and left wing elements, he essentially turned his back on the Russian support that ultimately led to his downfall. So Feng-shih turned to the Russians for aid, claiming Chiang Kai-shek betrayed him as well. He needed guns, he said, because he knew the Japanese were looking at Manchuria as if it was their Manifest Destiny—that's the right expression isn't it?" he asked. "It was looking like they were going to march right in and take everything, which is what they ultimately did. The Japanese set up a puppet regime and put the last Manchu emperor, P'u-yi, on the throne as a figure head, calling their new state Manchukuo. Feng-shih would have made a deal with anyone to survive, and he did.

"Feng-shih withdrew further into the mountains after that, where he grew, harvested, and sold opium to any and all takers, which is where I knew him. I had minor business dealing with the Triads in Hong Kong—as if any business dealing with those bastards is minor," he added gently. "Feng-shih dealt in guns because he was basically an arms dealer. He believed it was better to deal from strength; but the only guns he had were old and useless. His army, once standing at fifty thousand, sometimes even up to seventy thousand men, was decimated by disease and guerrilla fighting with the Japanese. They finally left to join the fledgling Communist army to the south. A civil war was breaking out between the Communists and Chang-Kai-shek. But Mao was garnering a lot of support with his eloquence. In the end, it was a matter of joining together to fight the common enemy, or being destroyed from both sides. Long and short of it? Feng-shih lost his army to Chairman Mao and the Long March, and he was left with no more than two thousand men. They were the old and weak; the ones unable to make the trek south, and whose party politics had outgrown their youth. Feng-shih collected taxes from the surrounding villages using these men, and dispensed a barbaric code of justice according to his own interpretation of what had to be done. But he was old, and time wasn't his best companion. He became addicted to his own opium, looking for relief because of the gout in his foot, and he often smoked it as he sat on his judgment seat. Paranoid, delusional, overly suspicious, and apprehensive; he suspected everyone was trying to overthrow him—so much so, that he killed his oldest son in a rage.

"I remember when Alex and Lin were brought in to tell us about the mission. Feng-shih was sitting bundled up on his cushions in what he liked to call his throne room; a gorgeous room of black lacquered panels and parquet floors—sumptuously decorated with huge vases from who knows how many different dynasties—with paintings, murals, and jade and ivory sculptures standing in every available nook and cranny; there was sunshine coming in through a top window somewhere. He liked Western music—I don't know where he first heard it—and he had a wind up gramophone somewhere that played old Jazz records.  The room was alive with Bessy Smith, Billie Holiday, and a dozen other singers I've never heard of, but that he swore by.

"He always had his water pipe beside him, and a cloud of smoke hung over our heads like a thick fog when Lin and Alex came in. Feng-shih was looking for all the world like a true Mandarin Warlord with his long, drooping moustaches, flowing silk robes, and sheathed fingernails. Because they came to him thinking he was their only hope, it was an impression he felt he had to make, something he wanted to convey to the refugees. He had his hair tied back in a long queue—a long, twisted, grey braid he sometimes played with to amuse himself. I sat on his left side holding a mouthpiece and smoking opium, while his youngest son, Feng, was on the other side, looking at the two of us with open disgust.

"Feng was his heir, and the old man was grooming the boy by how he felt the world should be ruled—'his world' he called it; he still referred to this northern corner of Manchuria as 'his world', and refused to call it Manchukuo. Feng was the youngest son of Feng-shih's fourth wife; educated abroad, he had his own ideas—and that can be a dangerous game for a man to play—any man—but even more dangerous when you're playing with a man as paranoid and delusional as Feng-shih. Feng sometimes spoke to me about the political atmosphere in the country, because he knew I'd been to other places in my life. He couldn't understand why his father supported Chiang Kai-shek's reasons for turning on Sun Yat-sen, or betraying the Communists; there was little the old man did that made any sense to Feng.

"It was Feng-shih who questioned Alex that day and denounced him for being a Christian—I suppose his recollection of 'General Christian' still bothered him, even though the man was in exile somewhere in Hong Kong—because he swore at Alex for being a coward, and told him he was of a right mind to raise an army and fight himself—even though he knew they were Japanese soldiers and we didn't stand a chance. Lin spoke up with all the eagerness of youth, and said he'd gladly support any move against the bandits. Old Feng-shih applauded his bravery, and told Lin he could be guaranteed he'd be there if it came to that. Alex quoted something out of the Bible to us, and Feng-shih laughed. I can't remember what it was, but it wasn't the usual 'vengeance is mine saith the Lord.'

"Feng-shih sent them away after that. They had nothing to offer as far as information went, and almost as soon as they were out of the room, Feng turned on his father and asked what he could've been thinking to say something like that to the boy? 'What', he asked, 'is there to stop the boy from telling everyone the Warlord's going to raise an army and fight the bandits himself? And why didn't you tell him it was the Japanese army we'd be facing, instead of letting him think it was bandits?'

"I told Feng I'd talk to the two boys and explain what was happening. I had my own reasons of course, thinking I'd be able to talk to Alex. Feng-shih surprised us both however, by saying he was thinking of raising an army and facing the invading troops. He said he still had a standing army of almost two thousand soldiers, and with all the refugees here, they could easily wipe out a force of three hundred Japanese—especially if he was there to lead them. He pointed at Lin as a good example of the desire he was certain would burn in the hearts of every man, woman and child out there, saying there was no emotion stronger than vengeance.

"I went to see Lin and Alex later that night, just one more shadow among the leaping shadows of the hundreds of different camp fires. Alex refused to have anything to do with me, believing me to be an associate of the Warlord's, and therefore an evil man. He left the small tent Su-mei, Wei and Freda built using the wheels of the old cart they brought, sitting under the fading moonlight to read his Bible--the only thing he'd been able to save from the mission. I sat with the others in the leaping shadows of that make-shift tent made up of old blankets and ripped up tarps, while they told me everything that'd happened to them over the last two days; rather, Lin and Su-mei told me. There was a small fire that Lin kept poking at with a stick as he spoke, and the sparks would dance and leap into the night sky, looking for all the world as bright as the stars above before they faded and dwindled back into nothingness.

"It was the first time I saw Freda. She was a tiny slip of a girl—a whisper my mother would have called her—with small, delicate, wire framed glasses that seemed to magnify her dark eyes, and sparkled in the light of a dozen different camp fires around us. She had long, straight black hair, and it hung down to the small of her back. She looked more like a girl of twelve than the young woman of seventeen they said she was. She was sitting with Wei wrapped tightly in her arms, her hair cascading around the two of them and shutting the world out as she rocked him back and forth, humming to him softly; the boy was asleep, looking peaceful and contented behind that veil of soft hair. She had an aloofness to her though, a reserved shyness—almost what I'd have to call a hesitancy—it wasn't perplexity, skepticism, doubt, or anything like that—but something more along the lines of an unassuming modesty—because she looked away whenever I looked at her. She was plain, though not unattractive in that Asian way, but still, there was something about her—something that drew me to her. I wouldn't say it was magnetism—because I've seen that in other people over the years--but it was something more than that, if that's possible. And the whole time I was there, children kept coming to her, looking for her blessings I imagine, reaching out for a little piece of her—just wanting to touch her before they drifted off to sleep—looking for that compassion she seemed to exude like some people do confidence—their mothers bowing, smiling, not even pretending to understand what it was all about, but asking for her forgiveness just the same because the children insisted on coming out.

"There was a sort of peacefulness that lay over the camp as well. Where the people were at each other's throats just days before, now they seemed at ease with each other, as if there was some sort of reassuring feeling that everything would work out for the best; that they were in safe hands. I could feel it myself. There was just something about the girl that seemed to captivate people and inspire them, and I guess I was no exception.